Troy Jollimore, “Love and Truth”
Friday, October 4th
12:00 PM, Humanities Center, PAC 113
Troy Jollimore earned his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1999. He is the author of three philosophical books, including Love’s Vision and On Loyalty, and the editor of The Virtue of Loyalty, published earlier this year. His articles and reviews have appeared in several anthologies, including the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Love, the Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, and the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Friendship, and in journals including Ethics, Synthese, and Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He has also published four collections of poetry, for which he has received a National Book Critics Circle award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a former External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and he was CSU Chico’s Outstanding Professor for AY 2009-2010.
Michelle Rose, "Queer before Queer Theory: Alain Locke's Indictment of Reproduction and Inheritance of Whiteness"
Friday, November 1st
12:00 PM, Humanities Center, PAC 113
Michelle Rose earned her PhD from Brown University in 2020. She is a former Dean’s Fellow at Brown University and former Graduate Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Rose’s work has appeared in the journal of Political Theory. Her current book project recovers the political significance of Alain Locke’s theory and practice. Locke was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. He defended the expressive autonomy of artists against other calls for propaganda. Locke understood aesthetics as capable of providing a “flank attack on discrimination” during the Jim Crow era.
Jed Wyrick, "What does it mean to refer to religion as Neo-Platonic?"
Friday, December 6th
12:00 PM, Humanities Center, PAC 113
Neoplatonism refers to the systematic approach to the philosophy of Plato achieved beginning in the 3rd century CE by Plotinus and his successors. Their worldview was influential on early and medieval Christianity as well as on Islamic philosophy and Islamic religious movements, including Sufism, Shi’ism, and numerous Shi’i sectarian offshoots. Through Islamic philosophy and Sufism, it came to Judaism and again to Catholicism and later helped inspire Deism. Finally, Neoplatonism “reinfected” several American Protestant religious movements in the 19th century. The influence of Neoplatonism is commonly regarded as limited to the process of achieving union with the divine practiced by a few isolated mystics. But Neoplatonism is arguably a key ingredient in familiar religious views on the soul and its fate, in a persistent view of the structure and origins of the cosmos, and in widespread practices that attempt to influence the divine and bring down its bounty.
Jed Wyrick is a Professor of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. He holds a B.A. in Classics at Brandeis University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and is the author of The Ascension of Authorship: Attribution, Textualization, and Canon Formation in Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian Traditions (Harvard University Press, 2004). Dr. Wyrick teaches courses in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Antisemitism and Islamophobia, Ancient and Medieval Art and Literature, and Religion and the Arts.
